Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 580, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1257 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this specific card. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 165 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 580 should in theory be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
	Difference: 31744 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 is quite a bit (more or less 202%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 121008 (202%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 580 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16224 (68%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.